Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

DarkKnightRadick writes "An archaeologist and a hydrologist have published evidence that the ancient Mayans had pressurized plumbing as early as sometime between the year 100 (when the city of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, was first founded) and 800 (when it was abandoned). While the Egyptians had plumbing way earlier (around 2500 BC), this is the first instance of plumbing in the New World prior to European exploration and conquest."

Actually, until Typhoid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid) struck in the late 19th century, even king's used to defecate in their bedrooms. The stench of feces used to be quite common amongst the civilised.

It usually takes a large amount of death/discomfort/destruction for things to change unfortunately. Especially with such a large public works project such as sanitation and clean water.

All though the Thames still stinks, I'm sure that it used to be much, much, much worse than even India at the time.

you mean it was re-gaining traction. Funny how it took western civilization over 1500 years to get back to where medicine was at the peak of the Roman Empire. Marcus Varro, 36 B.C. "and because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases". Other Roman doctors know to use antiseptics and antibiotics, and knew of germs/viruses by indirect means. Of course, 600 years before that, Indian civilization knew and wrote of living infectious agents they couldn't see , and had drugs and procedure to kill them and to inoculate.

But in the mid 19th century U.S. physicians were putting leaches on Abraham Lincoln, the primitive morons.

The question is, did those ancient Roman and Indian physicians actually know about germs, or were they just making a lucky guess? Without a microscope, the idea of "miasma" ("bad air") as an explanation for infectious disease, which was popular up through the 19th c., actually makes just about as much sense as germ theory. So I'd be interested to know the process by which the ancients arrived at their conclusion -- unless they devised some very clever experiments, they didn't really know what they were dealing with.

I wouldn't say a lucky guess. You don't have to see something to infer it's existence. The spread of a disease, the way it's spread, and the ways to stop it from spreading could all have led them to the conclusion that the disease was caused by some air-bound, invisible (to them) agent. Those Romans and ancient Indians seemed like smart guys. Presumably, they could imagine that some things were too small to be seen. They did both come up with the idea of the atom [wikipedia.org], after all.

Imagination isn't the same thing as inference. The fact that they could imagine germs, and for that matter atoms, doesn't mean that they actually knew such things existed in the same sense that we know today that they exist. Now, obviously, we can in fact infer the existence of things we can't see, and we have a well-established process for doing just that. I'm mainly curious as to how far back that process goes; the body of practices that we now call "the scientific method" is generally dated to the lat

They did both come up with the idea of the atom [wikipedia.org], after all.

Atomism is a greek concept, not Roman, also, it was not a commonly accepted theory, far less so than say elements/humours.

You can easily over-interpret translations of older texts; that text by Varro could just as easily have been talking about dust mites rather than viruses/bacteria. I don't think it's fair to compare speculation in this case with the more thorough understanding we have of bacteria.

The Romans and Greeks knew full well that dirty water spreads disease. That is why they went to such extraordinary lengths to gather water high in the mountains and pipe it through the cities. Their civil engineers did not need microscopes to figure that out.

The Romans and Greeks knew full well that dirty water spreads disease. That is why they went to such extraordinary lengths to gather water high in the mountains and pipe it through the cities. Their civil engineers did not need microscopes to figure that out.

And right now there are still countries where people take water in the spring that comes to their house and clean their ass and throw their garbage in the the same spring, for the next house 20m below to enjoy. This kind of logic baffles the mind.

I often wonder where we would be if the greco-romans had the idea to use steam power... (Heron knew steam could be used on a small scale, but never thought 'bigger'). Their society was happy to rely on slaves I guess...

Knowing that dirty water spreads disease isn't the same thing as knowing why it spreads disease. Sanitation can be observed to be effective without any explanation of the underlying mechanism. My question is, did Varro and his Indian predecessors actually have evidence for their pathogen hypothesis, or did they simply pick the one of several possible explanations that happened to be right? If the former, I'd very interested to know what it was -- it's always fascinating when some bit of scientific knowle

The question is, did those ancient Roman and Indian physicians actually know about germs, or were they just making a lucky guess?

But you can apply such an argument to anybody who doesn't have all the facts. Did Robert Boyle know, for certain, that gases were composed of minute particles, the kinetics of which could be used to derive his "Boyle's Law?" He did not. In the same sense as you are now implying, he made a "lucky guess." A guess which turned out to be correct, and his name has survived in history even though, in modern terms, he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.

If somebody posits that minute organisms are the ultimate cause of disease, then I give that person props. I really don't give a shit that he cannot prove whether he's right. That fact is, he IS right. You attitude smacks of the bitterness of a person who has perpetually sought success but never achieved it. Whatever.

Boyle's laws can be confirmed by experiment without knowledge of the kinetics; he wasn't just guessing, he was formulating a model based on his observations. With regards to infectious disease, this is roughly equivalent to sanitary practices, which can be shown to work without an underlying knowledge of germ theory. But if you're going to propose a mechanism -- the behavior of gas molecules in the first case, that of infectious microorganisms in the second -- then unless you have some kind of evidence, then yes, it's a lucky guess. There is a reason why "model" and "theory" are two different words. Note that I'm not claiming models aren't useful; of course they are. But they do not lead to understanding of the underlying mechanisms in and of themselves.

Reading the actual document he was warning about tiny airborne animals and recommended avoiding living near, or building on high ground (in good air), or so that the prevailing winds did not blow from the swamp...

Sounds like the miasma theory by another name.... which works because generally Bad air does mean disease

The London Sewers were built because of the miasma theory, not germ theory (which came later).... and worked....

Just because a theory is wrong does not mean it doesn't work, and if it works i

Just speculating but I'd reckon that once someone conceived of the idea of tiny little creatures, you'd then start to think of ways to get rid of them. Washing off, drying out, perhaps treating with salt and so on all spring to mind immediately but wouldn't if you were intellectually stuck on miasmas. With a bad smell you're more or less holding your hands up and saying "well, you're screwed, there's nothing we can do about it".

Last time I checked the Bible, the old testament has passages about to bury your feces, not to make love with a menstruating woman, and some other common sense stuff. Heck, do you have any idea why Jews and Muslims don't eat pork?

I and most Christians I know do not have a problem with condoms, and we probably wouldn't even recommend prayer as the most effective way to prevent HIV. What we'd probably recommend instead is to only have sex with the person you're married to. Sure, this doesn't work too well against rape and blood transfusions, but then again, condoms don't really work there either.

But in the mid 19th century U.S. physicians were putting leaches on Abraham Lincoln, the primitive morons.

Don't forget that its widely believe Lincoln would have recovered to some degree, albeit with a bullet in his head, had it not been for his doctors constantly running metal probes and even their fingers into his brain while he was incapacitated.

It was actually Lincoln's doctors, literally, who were the instrument of death.

with a very weak black powder charge behind it and 2-1/2" barrel, the 44 cal Philadelphia Deringer's wounds should have been highly survivable. Lincoln lived for 9 hours, maybe the doctors killed him with their bloodletting.

Actually, you can thank Alexander the Great for the loss of the theory of atomism. Aristotle had a competing theory and he was Alexander the Great's tutor. As a result of his political connections, Aristotle's theory won the day.

I agree with you that even kings used to defecate in their own bedrooms, but I'm inclined to see that as a relatively temporary period that was the result of advances in civil engineering outpacing advances in medicine. Kings, and other rich people, got used to the smells because they had to if they wanted to live in their stone castles and fortresses.

Ideally, we would have had plumbing as soon as we stopped being nomads. Unfortunately, we had to deal with centuries (millennia?) of filthy people who shat

All joking aside, Native Americans both in North and South America had rather terrible sanitation systems, even by the standards of their day. It was not unusual for them to defecate around the fire pits where they cooked and ate.

All my modding in this thread will be wasted now, but I don't have a mod named

[citation needed]

I've never heard Mayans called the "Native Americans" of South America.

With all the home repairs I've done over the last few years, "shoddy/lazy" work isn't the exception, it's the norm. I'd be delighted to find well thought out and designed work than the crap that they've been building for the last couple decades.

3/4" pipe coming into the bathroom would be one of those examples. You *may* have 3/4" pipe coming in there, but you'll have 1/2" pipe coming in between the meter and the house. I've installed quite a few whole house water filtration

There was Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in the Indus valley, then the Egyptians, then the Mayans. Is it just coincidence that advanced cultures tend to go under within a couple of centuries after they invent plumbing? If so, are we doomed?

I doubt that it's the plumbing per se; but a rise in interlocking technical and social complexity really helps if you want to "go under" in a way dramatic enough for history to notice.

Barring fairly rare events(like the sudden appearance of really nasty plagues, or an advanced culture showing up and gunning you down, or both), low-complexity cultures don't really "collapse" in any useful sense. They wax and wane a bit, some years good some years bad, and they may undergo various sorts of linguistic and genetic shifts due to warfare and migration; but they aren't specialized enough for things to really go to hell.

If you have interlocking specialization, though, you have entire institutions, and populations, that are basically dependent on large numbers of other structures and people for their continued existence. This makes it fairly easy for the right push to, instead of "reducing the hunter-gatherer population by ~10%" do something more along the lines of "catastrophic mass starvation, entire cities abandoned to the flames, the capital investments of 200 years annihilated within months".

What'll be different, I think, is that a lot less information will be lost in the demise of a "modern" culture simply due to the global (that's the key word here) communications network and data archival abilities we now possess. If the US went into oblivion, the world wouldn't have to re-invent the Ford Model-T or "Freedom Fries"; That data will be quite difficult to get rid of due to geographic redundancy.

Also, spoken langauges don't die off in short periods of time. Given the available compute power a

What'll be different, I think, is that a lot less information will be lost in the demise of a "modern" culture simply due to the global (that's the key word here) communications network and data archival abilities we now possess. If the US went into oblivion, the world wouldn't have to re-invent the Ford Model-T or "Freedom Fries"; That data will be quite difficult to get rid of due to geographic redundancy.

Also, spoken langauges don't die off in short periods of time. Given the available compute power and potential advances in translation software, it should be relively easy to bring texts up to the new language. You won't need a giant rock and guys like Daniel Jackson spouting some Goa'uld nonsense.

If you can't read Shakespeare in English, what's the point? Dante's Inferno becomes a work of intellect and story and loses all poetic meaning.

Your socalled "Freedom Fries" are a European invention, it's one of those rare things invented in Belgium worth a damn, and one of the few things Belgians are proud of (together with our beers & chocolates)

If the U.S. went into oblivion suddenly, the entire world's technological infrastructure would fail. Not just because of the loss of the U.S., but because of the turmoil and disorder that would result (or have been the cause). 50 years ago, the collapse would have been much less, 50 years from now such a collapse would be much worse (assuming the U.S. maintains its current position of dominance for the next 50 years).
If the U.S. does not maintain its current position of dominance for at least the next 20 y

When I was in grad school at Columbia, I lived in a Harlem sub-let that had plumbing from about about 100 C.E.

I seem to recall some Mayan hieroglyphs around the front door, too. They translated as "Manny is a fuggin' puto"

I don't know about the culture of New York, but those few years almost put me under. You could buy seven dollar bags of brown heroin in my building day or night. That, and the cockroaches the size of nutria did not make for an atm

For my part, I've realized that after a lot of years camping and having to squat over a hole I dig, that at some point my knees simply won't let me do that any more. I've come to believe that maybe people die younger in parts of the world that lack sit down toilets and remember this quote by Charles Bukowski:

Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (p

Guess we all know where all Mayans sacrificial human remains got flushed into now. I'm sure it'll be no time before some archaeological hippy is down there collecting petrified poo and proving the Mayan doomsday 2012 calendar wrong.

The guy who has the photo credit in the article (Kirk French) was my Archaeology TA during my freshman year. (I'm currently attending PSU for an EE degree). He's a really cool guy, glad to see he's doing well.

That aside, this is actually a pretty big discovery; very few ancient civilizations actually managed complex engineering achievements like running water. If anything this just adds to the mystery, if they had engineering knowledge of similar level to the Romans, why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Still not similar, it seems. And don't we have a sensibly clear image of what happened with their civilisation? (certain stagnation to some degree, also perhaps due to wasting of human resources; and locked into delicate, almost ceremonial balance with other local powers...a state which was rapidly destabilised by arrival of Europeans?)

The theory that was told to me by Mayans, and confirmed by several online sources, is that of severe drought, exacerbated by deforestation. It seems that most large tribes split, smaller ones formed, and perhaps some small villages existed in a relative state of anarchy. By the time the Europeans arrived, there were still (or again) some larger tribes. Of course, the Mayans still live today, both ethnically and -- to a degree -- culturally.

When we're talking about the "collapse" of the Maya, we usually mean the "collapse" of the Mayan classic civilization and that usually means the abandonment circa AD800 - 1000 of what might have been cities but which were, in my opinion, which is always correct, because I speak loudly in restaurants, really big haciendas that put The Ponderosa to shame. This has nothing to do with the disappearance of the Maya people (Van Daniken aside) or the disappearance of their language or culture. Hell, the Maya held

If anything this just adds to the mystery, if they had engineering knowledge of similar level to the Romans, why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Probably much like Roman civilization, the main power structure lost control. That seems to be recurring throughout all history and cultures.

Obviously that's a huge simplification, but it no doubt contributed to the "collapse" of their civilization. I put "collapse" in parentheses, because Mayan civilization still exists to a certain degree.

I've heard the theory suggested that engineering knowledge(and accompanying social and technical organization) is exactly what allows a civilization to suddenly die out.

Technology(speaking in the broad sense, including things like complex social structures, bureaucracies, and so forth) is extremely powerful; but also makes it fairly easy to get locked-in to brittle trajectories where(even if alternatives are theoretically possible), your only real approach to any problem becomes "do whatever it is we already do; but more, and harder". This often goes poorly. Worse, you have usually managed to build a population that depends on your complex social structures, which makes for a fun die-off if they should come loose.

When the Roman legions stopped being a net gain, through plunder and Romanization, and started to become a liability(since they couldn't expand the borders any further, and spent most of their time fighting civil wars to install one emperor after another), Roman civilization as a whole never really came up with an alternative. They pretty much just raised more, tried harder, passed a few more laws to try to preserve the status quo. Long-view, they were following a doomed path, proximately, though, they didn't really have a whole lot of options. Any emperor who adopted a "fewer legions" policy would find himself replaced with extreme prejudice by somebody willing to do the opposite.

I don't know how the Mayans went down; but complexity quite possibly helped them along.

Is it really that different from the Vikings, given the Nordic experiments in international trade? The British Empire also ran out of places to invade and ran out of ways to pay for a gigantic military infrastructure. If you look at the Hittite Empire, we still don't know much about the collapse other than their expansion started to decline and they plunged into a bunch of civil wars soon after.

I'm going to offer the following conjecture: that ANY militaristic power above a certain size, in order to survive

That aside, this is actually a pretty big discovery; very few ancient civilizations actually managed complex engineering achievements like running water.

Actually, the more I hear about ancient civilizations, the more I believe that in at least some regards, they had knowledge that was lost to the West until sometime after the Renaissance. They didn't know everything, but they sure as shit knew a lot. Certainly a lot more than has been attributed to them during most of my lifetime.

I believe the OP was making the common mistake of personifying the system instead of the people. That is common these days. However, the classic maya vanished before that, around 800 C.E. While the people didn't actually 'vanish', their way of life did. While it is possible that the maya became victims of their own overgrowth like the romans, subject to the law of diminishing returns, it seems more plausible they ju

However, classical Mayan civilization actually had writing. By the time Europian explorers "discovered" them, there was lots of old written material lying around, but nobody still living in the area knew how to read any of it. The culture in that area at the time was quite illiterate. Going from literacy to illiteracy qualifies as a cultural collapse to most folks.

Of course, given the Spanish's attitude towards the codexes (they considered them

Get them out before we have to endure more imcompetence. Is it any wonder the middle east is 3rd world? Those towelheads are to stipud to make a bumb even!

Careful, there. I have posted all sorts of horrible depraved "nigger" jokes, "Jew" jokes, and the like, and not one thing happened. Then I posted a joke about Muslims and Mohammad and *bam*, suddenly my IP address was blocked from Slashdot for several days. Slashdot even has a nice little webpage telling you that you've been blocked. Apparently the PC crowd has a lot of rampant favoritism, especially when one particular group gets its panties in a wad and bitches up a storm about everything a hell of a lot more than the others. Isn't it funny how it's considered cool to bash Christians and Judaeo-Christian beliefs in the media and Christians are expected to be adult enough to accept it and deal with it, but you make one negative remark about Islam and it suddenly doesn't work that way? AND no one sees this as a hypocritical double standard that needs to go?

It's hypocritical to an extent, but then again, the Jews and Christians typically don't threaten to kill you or follow through on their threats. I blame the moderate Muslims who say almost nothing against their extremist brethren. Other Christians put George Tiller in jail. Why is Osama still free?

Get them out before we have to endure more imcompetence. Is it any wonder the middle east is 3rd world? Those towelheads are to stipud to make a bumb even!

Careful, there. I have posted all sorts of horrible depraved "nigger" jokes, "Jew" jokes, and the like, and not one thing happened. Then I posted a joke about Muslims and Mohammad and *bam*, suddenly my IP address was blocked from Slashdot for several days. Slashdot even has a nice little webpage telling you that you've been blocked. Apparently the PC crowd has a lot of rampant favoritism, especially when one particular group gets its panties in a wad and bitches up a storm about everything a hell of a lot more than the others. Isn't it funny how it's considered cool to bash Christians and Judaeo-Christian beliefs in the media and Christians are expected to be adult enough to accept it and deal with it, but you make one negative remark about Islam and it suddenly doesn't work that way? AND no one sees this as a hypocritical double standard that needs to go?